


Afterimages

by TigerDragon



Series: Ironclad [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bisexual Character, Captivity, F/F, Gen, Missing Persons, Rape/Non-con References, Reunions, Sexual Tension, Technology, Workplace Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-26
Updated: 2012-04-08
Packaged: 2017-10-31 19:04:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/347399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/TigerDragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two months ago, Antonia Elizabeth Stark went missing in Afghanistan. Not a single word from her has been heard since, and the vultures are starting to gather. Pepper Potts, left with the whole load of her boss's responsibilities, spends most of her time running from one crisis to the next and putting out fires. Not much time for thinking about where Toni might be or what's happening to her.</p><p>Which is probably just as well, considering, because if and when Toni comes back their neat and tidy little corporate world is going to come apart around them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome, welcome. As usual, Tiger and Dragon do not own anything copyrighted by Marvel and are in no way trying to make money off this. Promise. So don't send the Disney wet-works squad after us, okay?
> 
> We're both huge fans of the Iron Man movies, and we thought it would be interesting to try out the implications of a change in Tony Stark's gender - what that would mean for his (her) relationships with other people in the story, what it would change and wouldn't about the way he (she) acts, things like that. What follows is us riffing on that, so we hope you enjoy it.
> 
> More detailed notes on what we changed, how and why will come at the end. Enjoy!

Slender fingers paused for a moment on wide, half-moon handles before their owner squared her shoulders and let herself into Ms. Stark’s office. Letting the door close softly behind her, Pepper moved quietly across the room, navy carpeting muffling her footsteps.  
  
Everything was exactly as it had been the last time she’d been there five weeks ago: the building’s air filters preventing a buildup of dust despite being a no-go zone for the cleaning staff, and even the tech support teams only interacted with Antonia Stark’s office remotely. According to the digital log, she was the first person to enter the room since Toni disappeared. Some days it hit her with fresh impact, like she’d just been informed about it for the first time. Some days it felt like a lifetime, like she’d been running the company in Toni’s absence for years.  
  
God, she hoped it didn’t come to that. She was already frayed at the edges.  
  
This little trip to her boss’ office wasn’t strictly necessary, so she figured she might as well admit the fact. She took the scenic route to the desk, lingering over the photographs, trophies, books, and occasional knick-knacks that occupied the space. Toni had flat-out told her that she didn’t mind Pepper examining or re-arranging her things, so the assistant took the opportunity to fiddle. Her life had been so fast-paced for the last eight years that she hadn’t had time to just play around for ages. Everything had to be efficient.  
  
Some of the stuff was familiar to her. Pepper knew the stories behind many of the trophies, not just the reasons for the awards but also the things Toni did on the nights she received them. If Toni ever pissed her off too much, Pepper reflected, she could always make a killing with a tell-all book.  
  
Some of the objects were still mysteries to her. The little stone cup on Toni’s desk, for instance. She’d pulled it out of a storage box one day, gotten a bittersweet look on her face, put it on the polished black tabletop, and said nothing about it.  
  
Moving to the little scented oil diffuser, Pepper smiled even as her eyes began to sting.  
  
_“What I’m saying, Toni, is that the CEO of Honda was upset that you insulted his cologne. Surely an unpleasant smell is something you can put up with in the name of better robotics?”  
  
“Their robotics are crap, and so was his cologne.” Antonia Stark was furiously beautiful, not delicate at all in spite of the three-inch heels and the five-figure dress, and the sharp brown tan of her skin went so well with the ebony black of her hair that someone who knew her slightly would have guessed they were both natural. They weren’t - the tan had taken two months under  full-spectrum light to establish and the hair was half a dozen shades darker than even the thick brown that would have been its natural color if it hadn’t spent those same two months being sun-bleached to something damn close to blonde.  
  
Antonia Stark enjoyed blondes, as she’d made vocally clear any number of times, but she had no intention of ever being seen in public as one.  
  
Some days later the “aromatherapy” piece, with a wide array of scent options, had arrived on Toni’s desk. The attached note read: ‘In case of smart yet stinky business partners.’  
  
Pepper had known when Toni opened it because of the laughter pealing out through closed doors.  
  
Toni never apologized for the snarky remark about the cologne, but she never made another one, either; that was how it was with Toni - once something was fixed, it didn’t need to be mentioned again. On to the next thing. _  
  
Putting the diffuser back on the desk, Pepper went to the table, poured herself a Scotch, and went back to the shelves. Brushing her free hand over a silvery photo frame, a frown drew her brows down in pained memory. It was a shot of Toni smiling and shaking the hand of a muddy relief worker in hardhat and combat boots, both standing in front of the debris of a New Orleans neighborhood.  
  
_“Ms. Stark,” Pepper said in the tone she used when Toni was being particularly unreasonable, “I know getting the water filters out to the hurricane victims is great PR, but we’re not even halfway through testing yet. There’s too much we don’t know. If something goes wrong it could turn into a PR disaster, not to mention a humanitarian one.”  
  
“They need fresh water, we’ve got the tools. Nothing is going to go wrong.” Toni peeled off her hardhat and tossed it underhand to one of the work crew - tough woman, big, broad in the shoulders - with a flirty wink that got her a tired grin in reply. Good story to tell later - ‘I was on the site when Stark came by, sweetheart, and she gave me the come-hither. I coulda hit that.’ That was the kind of thing Toni liked, her way of giving the people around her a lift. Plus a great way to have to settle a fuck-ton of harassment lawsuits, but that was a whole other thing. A staffer beat Toni to the car door and pulled it open, and she vaulted the right seat of the Rover. By the time Pepper got around and in the left, the smartphone was already out and Toni’s eyes had the look she got with a fresh set of specs in front of her. “Done deal. What’s next?”  
  
Frowning, Pepper clicked her seatbelt into place and fixed her boss with a hard look. “No, not done. Thousands of people could get sick or killed if the tech’s got the wrong kind of bug in it. It’s an unacceptable risk.”  
  
Toni looked up, eyes brown and wide and full of steel, and she dropped her voice to a murmur that couldn’t be heard in the front of the Jeep - that was just for Pepper’s ears, and was as hard as the polyceramic plating she’d designed for the upgrade of the M-1 tank. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo, so let me lay it out for you. One - thousands of people could get sick or killed if the tech’s bugged, which it isn’t, but tens of thousands of people **will** get sick or die if they don’t have clean water in this city and nobody else’s stuff is as good as ours. Two - I am the CEO of Stark Industries, last I checked I was also your boss, so when I say ‘what’s next’ what I mean is that I am ready to move on to the next god-damned problem because I’ve made my decision and am done spending brain cycles so I am asking you, Miss Potts, **what’s next**? ”  
  
Pepper sat back in her seat just a little, what in anyone else would be a full recoil. Tiny, quick movements of her face drew emotions whose expressions were small and tight enough to fit in the space of a breath.  
  
Turning to the bag she’d had custom-made to fit all of Ms. Stark’s phones and other devices, Pepper took out the PDA and opened the calendar. She cleared her throat once, almost silently, before speaking.  
  
“Three-fifteen flight to Maryland to meet with the DOD about the drone prototypes.”  
  
“Got it.” Toni’s fingers worked her smartphone. “Push my dinner with the Congressman off - if he smarms at me today, I’m gonna rip his face off. Find me a party with the right kind of girls instead. No, wait, boys. No... scratch that, both. I’m definitely going to need both.”  
  
Pepper nodded and went back to work.  
  
Seven days later, her parents got tickets to Tahiti in the mail. She found out when they called her, bubbling over the news. Toni never mentioned it.  
  
The filters worked fine.  
_  
Setting the photo back on the shelf, she shook her head and let another sip of liquor burn her throat. That was Toni through and through--acerbic, calculating, and still human enough to give people lavish apology presents or morale-boosting lechery.  
  
The tabloids and Stark-groupies had certainly had boosted morale after that particular party.  
  
“What the hell,” Pepper muttered to herself. Throwing back the rest of her drink, she thumped the glass down on the desk and dropped into the leather chair. She’d once heard Toni talk about the inherent unhealthyness of chairs, citing all sorts of health problems that people in low-chair-use cultures avoided. In response, Pepper had replaced all her own work chairs with Pilates balls and immediately experienced improved circulation, reduced joint pain, and a childish glee in bouncing all day long that she would admit to no one.  
  
Toni, when Pepper had ‘casually’ mentioned it, had simply smirked at her, leaned back in her chair, and taken a long drink from her tumbler.  
  
Health concerns had never stopped Toni from doing what she wanted, and in all fairness she seemed to be impervious to pedestrian things like biological problems.  
  
Clicking past the hot-rod screen saver, Pepper logged on to her own user profile. She could access it anywhere in the building--in truth, anywhere with a wireless connection--and so the location was purely sentimental.  
  
Fuck it. She was allowed to be a little sentimental after more than a month with no news of Toni. Last week, she’d had to summon the lawyers to make sure the petition to declare death, filed by one of the shareholders, stayed tied up in the courts for as long as humanly possible. Nobody was going to carve up Toni’s company on Pepper’s watch, that was for damn sure.  
  
StarkWatch 3.0 booted smoothly, the low-resource app pulling every agenda, progress report and productivity analysis from all four-hundred and seventy-five Stark facilities world-wide and condensing them into spreadsheets and visual expressions built for maximum ease of use. Five people had access to the program - Antonia Stark (CEO), Obadiah Stane (Chair of the Board of Directors, acting CEO), John Ross (CFO), Patricia Rollins (Director of Operations) and Pepper Potts - and only two had administrative access: Antonia Stark and Pepper Potts. It would run on anything - laptop, desktop, smartphone, tablet (the three Stark prototypes and the commercial ones once Apple got off its ass) - and made work for those five people orders of magnitude more efficient.  
  
_Pepper had been working for Ms. Stark for all of a week and a half when the software glut had made her snap._  
  
_“Okay, no,” she announced as she swept into Toni’s office. The CEO was in the middle of an impromptu massage on the chaise lounge, nubile young masseuse taking the interruption in stride. Toni didn’t even look up._  
  
_“Thirty programs is too many. Really inefficient, not to mention maddening. Trying to keep track of all the data with all these different interfaces is making my brain unravel, or at least feel like it. Isn’t there software that can collect all the relevant data and keep it accessible through **one** interface? Not even the tech people who’ve been here for years can explain everything about this god-forsaken mess!”_  
  
_“No, nothing like that.” Toni’s eyes were closed, her skin pale and slightly red under the masseuse's fingers,  and she looked like she didn’t have a care in the world. Then her face went completely still, almost blank, and her eyes snapped open to stare at some undefined point about twenty inches in front of her face. “But there really ought to be.”_  
  
_She sat up, careless of the fact she was wearing nothing but a towel around her waist, and stuck out a hand in the general direction of her desk. Waved it there for a moment, then glared at it when a suitable interface failed to appear. Kept glaring at the desktop the whole way to her chair, face still a little slack at the edges, and then her fingers started to dance over the keyboard._  
  
_“Parameters?” she asked nobody in particular._  
  
_Pepper pulled out a report, eyes darting around at the most vital information. “Data feed from all the Stark facilities: output numbers, costs, number of current projects, alerts for finished prototypes, shortages, bug problems, things like that. Give a spreadsheet to each facility, each category, make them all searchable and get graphics for the most-used information. A system to either send selected data to relevant people or give them limited access to the program.  We should be able to compile reports based on any two or more data points that we want--output versus time or number of prototypes versus MIT graduates, whatever. One interface, all the information, basically everything customizable. That’s what we want. I don’t know how you made it this long without being able to see your whole company at the same time.”_  
  
_“I can see it. It’s everyone else who can’t. Plus, y’know, I yell a lot.” Toni’s eyes flicked over the screen, but they were just error-checking - the speed of her typing and the odd, syncopated pauses made it obvious that whatever construction was getting done was happening inside her head long before her fingers hit the keys. “Be nice to be able to clear the storage space, though. Offboard it. Lots I could do with the room.”_  
  
_Pepper blinked. “You can do that? Selectively forget?”_  
  
_“Sure. Yeah. Well, kinda. Over-write, anyway. Only factual stuff. Emotional memory’s got its own mechanism. I’m working on that.”_  
  
_There were any number of wry things that, a year or even several months later, Pepper would have the confidence in their work relationship to say. Now, however, she was mostly just really happy that her boss had liked her idea enough to do something about it._  
  
_It took Toni three days to get the software working. Five days later, all the other interfaces were burned off her hard drives._  
  
_A month later, Toni couldn’t remember the name of the facility in Hong Kong and Pepper couldn’t help but smile when she pulled it off her phone._  
  
With a few taps of her fingers, Pepper flicked past the initial interface window and found herself looking at the summary of Toni’s last session. Date, time, data accessed, length of use. It was just a list, the same kind of list she’d looked at every day for years.  
  
Just a stupid list, but it had been the same for weeks, and it was beginning to feel like an artifact, like something dry and crumbling dug up from an ancient desert somewhere. She should really stop checking Toni’s usage history.  
  
She didn’t think she would, though. Not for a while. Not while she believed that Antonia Stark was still alive. Something in her wouldn’t allow her to stop.  
  
Any phone, any phone line, any wired computer anywhere in the world could tap the network, after all. If you were clever, if you knew the encryption inside and out, if you’d built it yourself from the first line of code up. You could tap it, you could message from it, you could leave a note that said ‘here I am, come get me’ if you were good enough.  
  
If you were Antonia Stark.


	2. Chapter 2

Despite her nearly compulsive punctuality, Pepper had waited until the last possible moment to leave for the airport. Being there when Toni returned was terribly important to her--more important than she’d admit to most--but she’d go mad if she had to sit still patiently while the C-17 from Afghanistan trundled its way overseas.   
  
It was only the fact that Happy would be waiting with her that finally got her into the Rolls with slightly more than five minutes to spare. He was, even under stress himself, a comfortingly solid presence in the driver’s seat, and Pepper smiled at him through her nerves. He nodded back to her, and they were on their way.  
  
The cargo plane rolled in ten minutes later than the quoted ETA, and Pepper was proud of her lack of hysterics. Her phone might have creaked a little in her white-knuckled grip while her blood pressure spiked, but nobody could say she wasn’t collected.  
  
Finally, after four and a half months, the cargo hold doors were lowering to the tarmac and there was Toni. Pepper gripped her hands together in front of her, swallowing all the crazy fluctuations in emotion that she’d only been partially prepared for and not really caring that she was probably doing the nostril-flaring thing again.   
  
They’d put her in a chair. That probably meant internal injuries, probably meant she’d cracked ribs or her legs or something worse - there hadn’t been time for a pathology report, and now Pepper was wishing she’d rung more out of Rhodey than a “she’s alive, she’s going to be fine” because even in a good silk shirt and wool suit Toni looked like hell. Her hair was ragged, clipped short and uneven like she’d done it herself with old scissors, and there were cuts across her face like she’d been scratched at with hot wires. Her arm was in a sling, maybe a fracture or maybe muscle strain, and there were still bruises along her jaw and cheekbone from what must have been a hell of a punch in the face or... or something worse.  They’d found her in the desert, beat to hell and half-dead of dehydration, and whatever had happened in those missing twenty weeks was something Toni hadn’t breathed a word about to Rhodey or the medics or the Stark consultants who’d been on the ground at the airstrip hospital they’d shipped her into from the desert.   
  
The door finished coming down, Pepper’s heart stopped, and Toni pushed herself out of the chair and stood up.  
  
Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes had to help her down the ramp, hands linked, but when her eyes caught the stretcher they flashed with a hot shock of anger and she jerked her head in dismissal. Whatever she said to Rhodey vanished into the fading noise of the plane’s engines shutting down, but Pepper caught the fond exasperation in his face and knew it must have been sharp. Probably profane.   
  
“Welcome home, Ms. Stark,” Pepper smiled, doing her best to hold still around all the churning worry and happiness. A tear managed to escape, and she brushed it away with a graceful hand.  
  
“Grieving for your lost chance to escape, Miss Potts?” There were shadows in Toni’s eyes, but she still remembered how to smile. Bright, sharp, the-world-had-better-move-or-get-hurt. Same as always. Still Toni.  
  
The grin that spread across Pepper’s face was slightly less than professional and entirely human. “Without a reference letter? No. Besides, I hate job hunting.”  
  
“Well, you’re off the hook. Vacation’s over.” Toni limped to the Rolls, let Happy open the door for her and sank into her usual seat on the right. Pepper took the left. For thirty long seconds, Antonia Stark leaned her head back and closed her eyes - saying and doing absolutely, 100% nothing.   
  
Then she straightened up like she’d seen something that spooked her, shook it off and threw Pepper another sharp smile. “Right, then. What’s next?”  
  
“Hospital,” Pepper answered simply, tapping something into her phone. “Happy, take us to the Regan UCLA, please. Tell them they’re going to need...”  
  
“No.”   
  
“No? But, Toni--”  
  
“No.” Toni’s voice was sharp, firm, decisive. The  I-have-made-up-my-mind-so-deal voice. “I am not going to a hospital. I am not going near a hospital. It is not happening.”  
  
“Toni, you have to...”  
  
“I’ve been trapped in a cave by fucking savages for a whole fucking season, Pepper, and now I’m back in America and I don’t have to do a damned thing.” Those brown eyes held her, hard and fierce, until she looked away. “What I want to do - what I am going to do - is two things. One, I want an American cheeseburger - no, two - with fries and a root beer milkshake and maybe some onion rings. Two -”  
  
The pause was long enough that Pepper put on her most emphatic ‘don’t want to know’ expression and started to get out Toni’s ‘social’ contact list.  
  
“No, not that.” Toni’s voiced sharpened into something like the blade of a knife, then shut down into a long, long breath. “Well, that, but not now. Later. Much later. Possibly after a serious date with some painkillers and the best stereo I’ve got. No, I need press. Reporters. Lots of reporters. Preferably cameras. Call a conference.”  
  
Replacing the social phone, Pepper’s head whipped around in surprise even as her hands reflexively pulled out the Blackberry both she and Toni called the Media Circus Baton. “Press conference? What on Earth for? All the papers know you got back today, Toni, you don’t have to-”  
  
“Pepper,” Toni said softly, “done deal. Happy? Drive. Cheeseburgers first.”  
  
Shaking her head, Pepper started making calls.   
  
It was a very interesting hour.  
  
Happy pulled up to the factory doors and Pepper ushered Toni out as fast as she could. The crowd of reporters surged forward around the car like sharks at a feeding frenzy, only giving up when the Rolls had achieved twenty miles an hour and was gliding towards the freeway.  
  
Inside the car was silence.  
  
Pepper pulled out the business phone, set it to silent, and turned it over in her hands a few times. She hardly ever fidgeted, but today, she figured, warranted it.  
  
Several times she opened her mouth around a question, only to stop, not sure she’d made use of all the available information. Toni didn’t mind her asking questions, but she hated it when Pepper asked questions that could be answered with a little research or reflection.   
  
During the months of Toni’s absence, Pepper had already researched a number of psychological studies of kidnap survivors and other traumas. Many of them had been frightening, and she’d refused to contemplate that Toni would come back a broken woman. So far she’d been elated to see her boss in one admittedly banged-up piece, but there was certainly damage she wasn’t talking about, and not knowing the extent of it or that trained professionals were treating it was driving her just a little crazy.  
  
Be supportive, but don’t put up with bullshit, most of the articles had said. Well, okay. She could do that. It was her job.  
  
“Deep thoughts, Miss Potts?” Toni’s eyes were closed, her breathing slow and steady, though the fingers of the hand that wasn’t in a sling fiddled restlessly with the belt buckle next to her. Every few minutes, her eyes would snap open and stare at the ceiling for a while, then close again - like she was avoiding looking at something, maybe, or just too tired to keep her eyes open. It was hard to tell the difference.  
  
“It seems appropriate, given the new values statement you made.” Voice steady and matter-of-fact, she let that hang in the air a bit before continuing. “What would you like me to tell the shareholders?”  
  
“Forty, maybe fifty point drop in share price today - they’re going to take a beating for a while. Tell them we’ve got divisions in everything from software and cellphones to genetics and agribusiness. Tell them we’re sitting on enough patents to rebuild the whole tech industry from the ground up and make Microsoft look small time if the SEC ever gets off our ass about it. Tell them we’re mid-development on a dozen major breakthroughs in alternative energy, and that we’re going to have cheap, non-chemical and proprietary spacelaunch in two years. Tell them we’re not going to be in the business of cranking out guns we can’t even be sure are going to wind up in the right hands anymore, and that ought to make them sleep better at night.” Toni’s eyes were still closed, but her lips twitched in the ghost of a smile. “Take your pick.”  
  
Thumbs dancing over her phone, Pepper quirked a smile. “I’ll skip the bit where we dis the SEC and play up the rest.” She hit ‘send’ and turned an inquisitive look at Toni. “Is the space launch thing new or just been off my radar?”  
  
“New. Remember the Jericho submunition? Repulsor tech - one way push, reactionless, low energy cost for big throughput?”  
  
Pepper nodded. “Yeah. It’s enough oomph to get out of the gravity well?”  
  
“Is if you scale it up. We couldn’t beat the heat problem, so we had to put it on the micros instead of trying to make a rifle or something, but you just need the right conduction rig and really good batteries or capacitors.” Toni reached up and tapped the side of her head lightly. “Gotta think about whether we’re gonna develop it, though. Design gets into the Pentagon’s hands, they’re gonna think orbital death ray or something. Idiots.”  
  
“Come on, I know you’ve fantasized about having your own orbital death ray,” Pepper snarked. “Hang on. You beat the heat problem? While you were...away?”  
  
“Yeah. That, too.” Toni’s lips twitched faintly again, though there was something in her eyes when they snapped open again to stare at the roof that was wild and dark as ashes. “Lots of time to think, relaxing accommodations, friendly hosts. Great vacation.”  
  
“Toni...” Pepper started. Paused. Ran a hand through her recently-mussed hair. She tried to freight her words with more care than usual.  
  
“Whatever you need, Toni. Just let me know.”   
  
“Right now I need a steak dinner and my own bed and a fistful of painkillers.” Toni finally lifted her head from the back of the seat and offered her Girl Friday the most reassuring smile she knew how. It wasn’t great, but it’d have to do. “Tomorrow will be soon enough, right?”  
  
Already dialing Ms. Stark’s favorite chef, Pepper nodded.   
  
“Thank you, Miss Potts.” Toni closed her eyes again, sank back into the seat, and let out a breath that seemed to empty out something she’d been holding in for God only knew how long. “Thank you.”  
  
A few more moments passed as Pepper made the relevant calls. Finally, shareholders placated, steak ordered, and a week-long supply of Vicodin on the way, she put the phone down and turned to her employer.  
  
“Will that be all, Ms. Stark?”   
  
Toni’s lips twitched again, and this time it was really a smile - tired and hurting, but unquestionably alive. “That will be all, Miss Potts.”


	3. Chapter 3

Sitting on Toni’s couch, Pepper thumbed through stock reports - all bad news, as expected, though not as bad as she’d quietly feared - while Toni ran through some Joy Formidable chords on her guitar at the other end of the room. Even with her arm in a sling she wasn’t too bad.  
  
JARVIS interrupted them with a polite ping.  
  
“Mr. Stane just crossed the property line, Ms. Stark,” the stuffy British AI informed them. “Would you like me to extend the welcome package?”  
  
Raising an eyebrow at the curve of her boss’ back, Pepper stood. The ‘welcome package’ was never good news.  
  
“No, let’s let him off the hook this once.” Toni put the guitar down, leaned back in her chair and pressed her fingers against her eyes for a few seconds. “Knew this was coming, just thought he might give me another day if I stayed out of the office. Pepper, whiskey for me and coffee for him?”  
  
“Of course,” Stark’s assistant murmured. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t have to talk Toni down from a rage once Stane left. That man was no good for anyone’s blood pressure, including himself.  
  
“Toni.” Stane walked in, pinstripe suit and loud red tie, cigar still clamped in his teeth, and put his hands on his hips like he was talking down a kid with a firecracker and a cigarette lighter. Which, admittedly, he’d probably done at some point. “Toni, Toni, Toni - what the hell was that?”  
  
“You’re going to have to be a little more specific, Obie. ‘That’ as in the press conference, ‘that’ as in our new business model, ‘that’ as in letting you hustle me off the stage and then not sticking around for the obligatory ass-chewing once you got done telling the press not to worry their pretty little heads about what I was saying, or ‘that’ as in the morning e-mails to the division heads to get me up to speed within 24 hours?” Toni leaned back in her chair and reached out, taking the cold glass out of Pepper’s hand and pressing it to her forehead for a few seconds before taking a long sip of the whiskey. “For God’s sake, whichever it is, will you sit down? You look like my sixth-grade history teacher trying to impress me.”  
  
Pasting a bland smile on her face, Pepper handed Obadiah the coffee and parked herself on the sofa a diplomatic yet still supportive distance from Toni. She’d worked out the proper spatial arrangement in her first months on the job, adjusting for mood shifts accordingly.  
  
Pulling a hand down over his face in a gesture of exasperation very evocative indeed of junior high teachers around the world, the Chair of the Board sat next to Toni, a hand on her good shoulder.  
  
“Toni, hon. I know you’ve been through a lot. But we’ve got to keep the company strong. Your father would have wanted it that way. It’s too much to throw away in a fit of PTSD.”  
  
Toni’s eyes narrowed and her jaw set. Pepper tried not to wince too visibly. This wasn’t going to be good.   
  
“We have plenty of divisions that make a profit making things that don’t blow up, Obie. Cellphones have a better profit margin than landmines, and the refits on the F-22 don’t touch what we’re going to make on the short-season wheat we’ve got in development. It’s not as quick and it’s not as flashy, and maybe we have to seed a little more money away to do it, but …” Toni was trying to be reasonable. Doubly not-good. Toni trying to be reasonable meant that when her temper finally popped, it was going to hit like a hurricane and not like a hand-grenade.  
  
“Quick? Flashy? No, no, no, Toni, it’s not about quick and flashy,” Stane countered, working up to one of his best soap-box moments. Pepper sometimes wondered if he was under delusions of constant media attention or if he just liked the sound of his own voice that much. “It’s about legacy. Stability. Holding back the forces of chaos in an uncertain world. We need investor certainty more than we need fast cash, Toni, and what Stark Industries stands for....”  
  
“Obie, did you take my name off the wall when I wasn’t looking?” Toni gave him a beat to open his mouth, then cut him off. “No, you didn’t. It’s my name on the building, my ideas that make it go, and I am saying that we are out of the business of war because the whole line about making the good guys the most dangerous men in the world? It’s bullshit, Obie. I saw our guns in the hands of fucking bastards who murder people for money and giggles, and that’s a fact I can’t buy my way out of knowing. So fuck the capital loss, fuck the waste of infrastructure, fuck the contract termination fees: Stark Industries and Stark International are done selling weapons. Period.”  
  
Thunderclouds moved across Stane’s face for a long moment. Then he took an overly-careful sip of coffee, set the cup down, and stood.  
  
“You’re not the only one with a stake in this company, Toni. My job is to protect the shareholders, from you if I have to, and I, at least, intend to do my job.”  
  
The bald man scooped up his jacket and headed for the door.   
  
“Good night, Toni. I’ll be in touch.”  
  
“Obie,” she said, soft but in a voice pitched to carry, “you might want to think about something.”  
  
He paused, his back still to her, and Pepper could see his jaw working with the anger he was barely holding in. Toni went on, unmoved. “I just spent twenty weeks in a cave surrounded by guys armed to the teeth who stuck a gun to my head and told me what they wanted me to do was build them the Jericho, to which purpose they had plenty of our tech on hand for me to strip. They told me that if I built it for them, they’d let me walk - maybe true, maybe not. I didn’t find out, ‘cause you know what I told them?” Her voice cracked in the air like a lash. “I told them to fuck off, Obie, which is the same thing I’m going to tell you and anybody else who tries to get me back in the business of selling weapons that could end up -  _have been_ ending up - in the hands of animals like that. So you better think about that real hard before you get in front of the board and tell them to come after me. Got it?”  
  
Obadiah didn’t slam the door on the way out. Quite. The exaggerated care he took closing it was just as clear a message.  
  
“Well,” Toni said after a second or two, “that went well.”  
  
Pepper got up, poured herself a mineral water, and kicked off her shoes before slumping on the sofa.   
  
“Remind me again why you can’t fire him?” She took a sip. “Or at least ship him to the Chauvinist Good-ol’ Boy holding tank?” Another sip. “We should build one of those, actually. A service to the world.” Put her glass down. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m rambling.”  
  
“No, it’s a good idea. Shame it doesn’t work. He’s got a twelve-percent stake in the company, which makes him the biggest shareholder after me personally, and more importantly he’s got the decisive block - the difference between sixty percent being in the family and on the market. Plus he’s always had pull with the Board, all the way back to when Dad let him face-man things to the Pentagon in the Good Old Days - that’s why I got stuck with him as Chairman in the first place. Someone to keep an eye on me.” Toni snorted softly, closing her eyes and pressing her hand over her face for a minute before they snapped open again. “So now he’s got a lot of cash we’re about to lose to wave around, and he’s gonna go to them and see if he can’t leverage me out. Even if he can’t do that, and I’ll bet you anything I can beg, borrow or steal the three percent I need to make it to fifty-one, he’ll try to convince them I’m out of my head so we can all go back to being ironmongers like Dad used to do. Shit.” She shook her head slowly, suddenly exhausted again, then glanced at Pepper with a rueful look in her eyes. “I just declared war, didn’t I?”  
  
“Pretty much.” The redhead picked up her glass again, just holding it for a moment. “Better that than the blowing-things-up kind of war, though.” Turning to her boss, she raised her glass in a toast. “I’ve never exactly been a peacenick, Toni, but I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder to have you as my boss.”  
  
Toni echoed the gesture with her own glass, tossing it back, then gave Pepper a searching look that seemed to be trying to pick her head apart and get inside. “You want to give me the expanded view, Pepper? Because I think you’re the only person I’ve seen in the last two days who didn’t think I was out of my damned mind.”  
  
Almost to the bottom of her glass, Pepper sat thoughtful for a moment.   
  
“You’ve thrown yourself into engineering, Toni. You’ve been making great things since you were a kid, and they’ve all been yours.   
  
“The company--that’s always been your dad’s. Arming the free world was his vision and something that worked in his century. You’ve added a lot of neat tech to the mix but the underlying hows and whys were still his.  
  
“But this. You had a life-changing experience and you won’t let the world stay the same, either. That freaks people out. I’m a little worried myself, but I can’t listen to you and think the changes are going to be anything but amazing. I want to live in a world shaped by the vision of Toni Stark, not just her tech.”  
  
A pause, and Pepper giggled to herself. “Ooh, that was good. I should put that in a PR statement.”  
  
“Do that,” Toni breathed, “and I just might have to kiss you, Pepper Potts.”  
  
“Promises, promises,” the redhead smirked, gracefully playing into the flirtation that they’d periodically toyed with throughout their working relationship.   
  
Toni just looked at her, eyes dark and full of things she couldn’t begin to get a grip on, and suddenly it didn’t feel so much like a joke anymore.   
  
Finishing off the Perrier with a hasty swig, Pepper stood and shuttled the drinkware off to the kitchen. With a finger on the home interface next to the fridge, she could talk with Toni from a comfortable distance. “More drinks? Or should I just get that statement typed up?”  
  
“Type it up.” She heard the slow, deep intake of Toni’s breath, and the equally slow exhale broken by the hitch of pain when the battered muscles in her left knee had to take weight. “I need to be in the garage. Apparently, I have a future to invent.”  
  
One hand on her forehead, the other on the interface, Pepper sighed. “I know saying this is futile, but try not to overwork yourself, please? I hate having to scrape you off the workbench.”  
  
“It could be worse,” Toni suggested over the soft tone of JARVIS unlocking the door that led down the garage and her workshop.  
  
“Do tell,” she dryly inquired, moving back into the living room. She shucked her jacket off, curled up with the furry pillow, and dragged the laptop over.   
  
Toni paused on the stairs, threw a grin over her shoulder, and delivered the coup-de-grace. “Miranda Kelly, my roomie at M.I.T., used to do her programming on her bed. In the nude.”   
  
By the time Pepper managed to get her voice working again, Toni had vanished down the stairs. “Damn.”  
  
That woman was going to be the death of her. One way or another.


	4. Chapter 4

It wasn’t the longest stretch of time Toni had ever spent in the garage - that had been the month solid of isolation that had preceded the Stark Unified Combat Optics System, which had rendered obsolete every infantry HUD or vision goggle system on the planet for a good two years before a competitor had managed to get back into the market and had netted Stark Industries something on the order of a hundred billion in worldwide profits - but even for her, three weeks was pushing it. Not that she hadn’t been productive. Toni’s private server was up thirty-seven proprietary designs in the past twenty days, several of them suitable for patent and at least a dozen practically market-ready, and not a single one of them was military, security or defense-oriented.   
  
On the other hand, nobody had seen or heard from her other than the delivery services bringing in parts, gear and food in what sometimes seemed like equal quantities. It was a _lot_ of hardware.  
  
Pepper had been keeping track of the supplies through StarkWatch. After years of observing Antonia Stark in her native habitat, the assistant could infer quite a lot about Toni’s work and well-being based solely on her requisitions, the house’s power usage, and how many embarrassing moments had appeared on YouTube. Lots, lots and none told Pepper that Ms. Stark was deep in a working phase. Only top-priority matters were worth braving the garage.  
  
After three weeks, Pepper had lined up the stock ducks. Now all she needed was Toni’s signature and then her boss would own the controlling shares in Stark Industries.  Stane and the board could suck it.  
  
Documents in hand, Pepper descended the stairs to the garage. A heavy metal track that sounded not unlike a jackhammer assaulted Ms. Potts before she even opened the door. She used the wall console to turn it down to something that wouldn’t rattle her teeth.  
  
“Don’t turn down my music when I’m working,” Toni called absently - the sound had an echo, like she had her head inside a car’s hood or maybe …  
  
It wasn’t a car.  
  
It wasn’t big enough to be a car. Quite. Looking at it from the angle she was at, she couldn’t tell _what_ it was except that it was the next thing to eight feet tall and vaguely bipedal. There were chunks and panels missing everywhere, a world of stray wiring, and Toni was half-tucked into the guts of it like a welder crawled up inside the ballast tank of a submarine. After another few seconds, her torso stopped shifting.  
  
“JARVIS, turn the music back up.” Now she sounded cross. “And run a power check on actuator twenty-three.”  
  
“Leave the music where it is, JARVIS,” Pepper hastily countermanded. As fascinated as she was by what Toni was working on, she had come down here with a mission. “I have the shares you need to get the controlling fifty-one percent,” she called across the room. “I just need your signature to make it final.”  Pen in hand, she approached the workspace, taking care to touch nothing.  
  
“Shit.” Toni growled the word, then slid free of whatever-it-was and scrubbed an oil-slick hand through her hair absently, her eyes still focused on whatever problem it was that was occupying her mind. She at least remembered to grab a cleaning cloth from the tool rack as she passed, so that by the time she got to Pepper she could take the expensive leather folio and the somewhat less expensive pen and etch out her brutally efficient signature without smearing lubricant all over the high-fiber paper. “Someday, Miss Potts, can’t you learn to forge my signature?”  
  
Finding the paperwork in order, Pepper smoothly closed the folio, tucked it under her arm, and smiled wryly. “I learned how to do that years ago, Ms. Stark. I reserve your actual signature for the things that need to be airtight.” Glancing back up again, she froze, mouth open.  
  
Her boss was wearing one of her typical working outfits--Carhartts, old boots, dime-a-dozen ribbed white tank. All of it had streaks of motor oil, including her face and pulled-back hair. It did nothing to hide the strength and sensuality of Toni’s body and everything to emphasize her brilliance and creativity. Secretly Pepper had always preferred this to the power suits and evening gowns, elegant as they were, but now the effect was magnified and she was glad she had a legitimate, totally-not-oggling-the-CEO reason to stare.  
  
Half-covered by the tank, a circle of pale blue light shone in Toni’s chest. Pepper’s first thought was that it was beautiful. Almost immediately her stomach clenched around the half-healed ulcer she’d developed during Ms. Stark’s absence.  
  
“Toni? Oh my god, how deep is that embedded in your chest?”  
  
“You don’t want to know. Had to be deep enough for the magnet to bubble my heart.” Toni glanced down, glanced up, and for about half a second her face _changed_ in a way that took all the life and thought and warmth out of it and left cold iron and ice behind. It only lasted a flicker of a moment, barely long enough for Pepper to be sure she’d even see anything at all - nobody else would have caught it.  
  
Nobody else knew Toni the way she did.  
  
The recovery was as smooth and precise as one of Toni’s automated forging machines. “Guess you didn’t get that part of the debriefing from Rhodey. Caught a chest full of metal fragments from one of our very own landmines. One of the doctors they were holding - sharp guy, top of the line brain - he rigged up an electromagnet to keep the barbs from migrating into my heart. Powered it off a damned car battery, which just goes to show he was a better doc than an engineer. Replacing that was the first thing I built over there.”  
  
Pepper frowned, mouth a tight, worried line. “Oh.” She swallowed. “So you still have the shards in you? Isn’t there a doctor who can take those out?”  
  
“Maybe. None of the army docs who checked me out after I called Rhodey felt up to it - said it’d be like fishing in a minefield for some very fine needles. Even if I could find someone who thought they were up to it, it’d be the mother of all surgeries and I’d be lucky to get full function back afterward. Not to mention spending eighteen months to two years in recovery.” Toni made a face, then shook her head. “For the moment, at least, the high-tech electromagnetic band-aid is beating out top-of-the-line medical care. Go figure.”  
  
Fingers tightening subtly on the leather document case, Pepper nodded once. “That makes an uncomfortable sort of sense.” Her eyes narrowed as she drew herself up into a slightly more authoritative posture. “Are you in pain? Are you on any medication? I don’t want a repeat of the Vicodin/tramadol incident.”  
  
“That was _one time_ ,” Toni noted dryly. “You’re never going to let me live that down?”  
  
“Oh, right, only once,” Pepper remarked with a dry exasperation. “Inducing seizures couldn’t _possibly_ be risky the first time.”  
  
“It was actually kind of fun, in a perverse sort of way.” Toni quirked a slightly wider grin. “Fine. No medications, no pain. I actually haven’t felt better in my life, which probably has something to do with having a substantial amount of extra energy being pumped into my body every few milliseconds. I’m pretty sure my IQ is up fifteen, twenty points already.”  
  
With a short laugh, Pepper’s shoulders lost the tension they’d been carrying since she saw Ms. Stark’s ‘high-tech band-aid.’ “Good to hear, Ms. Stark.” Tucking a stray hair back into place, her eyes wandered over to the...thing Toni was working on.  
  
“Is that a robot or a suit?”  
  
“Armor,” Toni said, glance over her shoulder and examining her creation with the critical eye of a sculptor evaluating an unfinished production. “Optics, enhanced lifting and mobility, heavy-duty damage proofing, internal atmosphere and environmental. Oh, and it flies.”  
  
Pepper started to nod, then froze, mouth open. It took her a second to get her voice back. “It flies? It must weigh a ton! What are you going to power it with?”  
  
Toni crooked a grin and tapped her chest lightly.  
  
An interesting series of expressions flashed over Pepper’s face as she ran through a number of possibilities: Toni was going to walk around in it at the next Stark Expo, looking cool. Toni wanted it to study volcanoes first-hand. Toni wanted to wade into war zones and...do what?  
  
Was this how she escaped?  
  
Finally, Pepper settled for guarded worry. “Toni...what are you going to do with it?”  
  
Toni took a full minute to look away from the suit, and when she did her expression was strange. Focused but not quite present, as if she was seeing something else overlaid across reality and the doubling of vision left her more than a bit lost. When she finally did answer, it was a murmur so soft that it almost sounded bemused. “Do you know, Pepper, I’m not sure I have any idea? I just... need to make it work. Better.”  
  
It was one of Toni’s most open moments--the genius ball-breaker in a state only a very few people would ever see her. Something in Pepper softened and it took effort not to lay a comforting hand on her boss’ arm.  
  
“You started it while you were gone, didn’t you.” It wasn’t really a question, and Pepper, curious as she was, would let it float away without a reply if that was what Toni wanted.  
  
“Look behind the 911,” Toni replied simply.  
  
The space behind the Porche had originally been intended for sculpture display, but Toni had never found one she liked and had wound up wiring the area for electricity on the thought she might install a few more server towers there, then forgotten about it entirely for almost a year. It wasn’t an area you could see from the door, or even easily from the center of the room. You had to walk past several cars to get a really good look.  
  
Complete, there was no mistaking what it was. Seven feet of heavy metal - steel, mostly, though there were hints of ceramics at the seams - formed into something vaguely the shape of a man. Or a woman. It was scored with carbonization in places, the boots bulky and distorted with heat warping from some form of long-term exposure to high-intensity flame, and there was really no mistaking the occasional scoring and denting that had to be from stray bullet fire.  
  
There was no mistaking the fittings along the arms, either. _Weapons. A lot of weapons._  
  
The thing behind the Porche was a golem of elegant destruction, a prehistoric avatar of death and devastation recast in modern alloys. If it didn’t have a life of its own, it ought to have.  
  
“God.” Eyes wide, Pepper gave the armor a look of combined horror and fascination. Her stomach started to churn as the evidence of Toni’s violent escape stood silent before her. The damage the suit had sustained suggested that there had been a lot of fighting, something Pepper didn’t want to acknowledge as real. She made herself do it anyway.  
  
“You literally engineered yourself out of captivity,” she said in a tone of amazement. “How on Earth did you get the time and materials to build this under their noses?”  
  
“They wanted my weapons,” Toni said softly, her voice the same kind of detached Pepper was used to hearing when Toni had a particularly difficult engineering problem on her mind. When emotion and everything else had to take a backseat to the exercise of her intellect. “They had quite a supply already, actually, but they wanted more. Bigger. Not just rifles and SAMs and RPGs - aerial combat drones. The Jericho.”  
  
“So they captured you to build them?” Pepper turned to face her boss again, lips slightly parted as if she were going to say more, then pressed them together again.  
  
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that. I don’t think they did.” Toni walked past her slowly, stepping around the Porsche and running her fingers over the battered metal of the armor’s chestplate, tracing it like a half-remembered lover. “Or if they did, they were the stupidest sons of bitches in the world. If you’re going to grab the world’s best weapon-maker, why keep her in a bunkered-up cave with her own scraps to build with? Why not dose me up with something and strap me down in a complex somewhere to catch every drabble that fell out of my head and then map it into workable tech right there in the factory? It doesn’t make sense, if you have the kind of resources you need to find out I was going to be there in the first place. It doesn’t track.  
  
“No, I think they were trying to hit the convoy. Maybe just for the hell of it, maybe for political gain, maybe because someone put them up to it. They blew the hell out of it, then came down from the hills to loot and found me bleeding from the chest. Probably recognized me from _Time_ or something. Dragged me back to camp, got Yinsen to patch me up, then got greedy. Figured I could make them the kings of their shitty little hill.”  
  
She stood still for a moment and then Pepper curled into herself, hands pressed to her stomach. Weaving over to drop herself onto the black leather couch, she fumbled a bottle of pills out of her purse, swallowed a little white one and a big pink one, and sat with her head in her hands.  
  
“Could I have some water, please?” Haggard as she was, she was polite as ever.  
  
“Jesus, Pepper.” Toni’s eyes were wide with shock, and she took the ten steps to the bar at just short of a run. She was a little slower coming back, but only a little, and without even slowing down she hit a knee in front of Pepper and put the water in her hand. Caught the bottle in the same motion, checking the pills, then swore again softly.  “Sucralfate, Zantac - for the Ranitidine, probably. How the hell did you let yourself get an ulcer?”  
  
Swallowing the water quickly, the pain loosened its grip on Pepper a little. She turned a rueful smile at her boss. “I caught it early. Been taking my medicine as prescribed,” she continued. Sighed, closed her eyes, and leaned back against the leather. “I’d never been literally worried sick before. Kind of caught me by surprise. I’m embarrassed, really.”  
  
“Embarrassed.” Toni’s jaw twitched, hard, and she set the pill bottle down with exaggerated care before taking Pepper’s hand hard in both of hers and speaking in a low, iron voice every bit as dangerous as any hardware she’s ever designed in her life. “Don’t you dare joke about this, Pepper. Stark Industries doesn’t work without you, do you get that? _I_ can’t work without you.”  
  
Her face a bit pale, Pepper opened her eyes again to meet her boss’ fierce gaze with a gentle voice. “I’ll be okay, Ms. Stark. Doc said so.” She had to look away after a second, the intensity of Toni’s gaze threatening to bring up too much of what was normally unspoken.  
  
Sitting up a little, she continued in a firmer tone. “I can laugh or I can cry about it, Toni,” she said.   _About you_ . “Not everyone has ‘analyze’ as a third option.”  
  
“I should fix that,” Toni muttered under her breath, then finally - reluctantly - let go of Pepper’s hand. “Someday.”  
  
A grin broke over Pepper’s face. “I’m sure you will, boss.” Glancing at the folio, Ms. Potts sighed. “Unless there’s something absolutely urgent, I’m going to have a courier take that back to the office and go take the rest of the day off.”  
  
“The rest of the week,” Toni murmured, and gave her a very firm look. “Go sit somewhere warm and try to relax. And see the doctor again.”  
  
Pepper smiled as she got more or less smoothly to her feet. “Yes ma’am, Ms. Stark. Remember to eat and drink at regular intervals. You know low blood sugar slows your thinking.”  
  
“I’ve had enough of that to last a lifetime, Miss Potts.” Toni’s lips twitched, that strange gauntness coming and going from her face again. “I’ll remember.”  
  
Toni showed her out the door, gave her hand one more squeeze, then went back to her armor.


	5. Chapter 5

The way all the conversation in the boardroom just _stopped_ when Antonia Stark walked through the door was as clear a signal as anything else that she was anything but expected. Which was more than a little irregular, since she was not only the plurality stockholder but now - possibly unbeknownst to the people in this room, admittedly - the _majority_ stockholder of both Stark Industries and Stark International. On the other hand, none of the men or women seated around the table would have hesitated to point out that Antonia Stark had committed more than a few irregularities of her own in the past.  
  
“Gentlemen,” Toni said in a voice like frosted steel, “I apologize for my lateness. It appears my invitation to the emergency meeting must have gone astray.” She laid a hand on the base of the table, looking up the twelve-seat length of it to meet Obadiah Stane’s eyes steadily, and smiled. It was not a particularly pleasant expression. “Mister Chairman. Is there a motion on the table?”  
  
There was a spectacularly awkward pause.  
  
Stane coughed once into his ham of a fist, allowed himself one sideways glare at Toni, and shuffled the top page of his stack somewhere into the middle. “We were just about to start, actually.” He leveled a politely strained gaze at Ms. Stark. “Please, have a seat.”  
  
“Don’t mind if I do.” Toni seated herself smoothly and smiled, gesturing to one of the chairs for aides that were placed against the wall. “Miss Potts, likewise.”  
  
Pepper strode over to a chair with her customary sleek efficiency. The week of rest had done her health very good, but she was more than ready to return to work. Apparently there was only so many novels she could read or bubble baths she could take before getting twitchy with pent-up energy. She had her PDA open and ready to take notes before she’d even sat down in a position perfect for monitoring Stane and maintaining line of sight with Toni. Only she and Toni knew that the handheld device was also recording an audio file of the entire proceedings.  
  
“Well, ladies, gentlemen, let’s begin.” From the tone of his voice, Stane seemed about to experience some stress-related health problems himself.   
  
It was an almost excruciatingly mundane meeting, which should not have been possible under the circumstances, but it was as obvious that the others were hoping Toni would get frustrated and leave as it was that she was waiting them out with more patience than Pepper would ever have expected from her. It took a full fifteen minutes, in fact, for Toni to take a slim metal-cased phone out of her pocket and start tapping at it.   
  
It was probably just as impressive that it took Obadiah forty-five minutes after that to boil over.  
  
“Are we boring you, Miss Stark?”  
  
Pepper looked up at Toni. The microexpression she saw confirmed that things were, in fact, going as planned.   
  
She should probably have asked what the plan was _before_ they came in.   
  
“I think we’re all absolutely enthralled with your cutting and incisive analysis of our stock drop, Obadiah.” Toni looked up from the phone in her hand and smiled again. It was a frighteningly cheerful expression. “But we all know that’s not the reason we’re here today, so let’s collectively dispense with the bull, shall we?”  
  
She let the silence hold for a beat, took in the stunned expression at the table, then went on as coolly as if she were giving the day’s weather. “I am taking the Stark family of companies out of the weapons business. Everything we’ve got that builds things that kill people, we’re going to repurpose for something else or we’re going to write off. That’s what I said in front of the press a month ago, those are the orders I as the CEO have been giving for the past five weeks, and that is where we are headed. Some of you sitting at this table think that’s a bad idea. Some of you are afraid of the cash flow problems the penalty clauses in our military contracts are going to cause. Some of you are just sweating the drop in your stock statements. Gentlemen, I have one piece of advice for you - get your big boy briefs on and deal with it, because this is the future and it is happening now.”  
  
Shock and rage and surprise rippled up and down the table. She didn’t even given them a chance to form words before she threw the phone in her hand hard to the table and send it skidding down between them until it fetched up in front of Patricia Rollins, Director of Operations and one of the only people in the room who seemed more stunned than incensed. After a few more seconds, she picked it up and tapped the screen. Blinked.  
  
Toni’s smile widened. “Yep. Still works. Meet the StarkPhone 4.0, running our proprietary interface. It’ll talk to Droid and Apple apps, not to mention all our software, it comes with two gigs of onboard memory and ten of storage on the Stark server mainframe, it will run off wireless, 4G or satellite seamlessly, and it packs enough processor power and RAM to manage your average MMO smoothly without a heat problem. Next thing to indestructible, ten hours of operational battery life, and coming to any retailer you can name for $300 _before_ your service provider knocks half or more of the price off to get you to come onboard. We can have them on the street in six months, in the hands of tech journalists in three weeks, and we will triple our share of the new smartphone market by the end of the year. Any questions?”  
  
Pepper was typing furiously with a tiny upward quirk to her mouth that meant suppressed laughter.  Toni didn’t blame her.  Most of the board looked like a band of chimps who’d just seen their ant hill taken away only to be replaced with an entire banana plantation.   
  
“That, I assure you, is the tip of the iceberg. But yes, before you ask, I’m aware we’re going to have a cash flow problem. Which is why you are all quietly going to sign your names on a vote of confidence, sit back and watch the money roll in, or you are going to put your stock and the table and I am going to personally buy you out here and now. Because we are going to the future with our hands clean, ladies and gentlemen, and I do not have time to dawdle with anyone who isn’t coming with me.   
  
“Mister Chairman, I move that Stark Industries and Stark International proceed with demilitarization and pursuit of new civilian initiatives immediately, and that the board provide a unanimous vote of support in favor of that effort. Do I have a second?”  
  
There was a long beat of silence.  
  
“I’ll second that motion,” Patricia Rollins said softly as she laid the phone back down on the table in front of her.  
  
Obadiah looked at her as if she’d started speaking in tongues.  
  
“Motion’s on the table,” Toni noted laconically. “In favor?”  
  
Rollins gave her assent almost immediately. Next to her was Jackson Reese, one of the more influential men on the board. He adjusted his reading glasses, picked up the phone, and examined it slowly. Nodding almost to himself, he handed the phone to the man on his left. “Aye.”  
  
After that, it wasn’t quite a stampede, but nobody quite managed the nerve for a no. Obadiah even choked down his rage and rubber-stamped it, once it was clear which way the board was going to go.   
  
The follow-up vote of confidence for public consumption didn’t even need a voice-vote - it passed without objection.   
  
“Thank you,” Toni said as she stood up, and surprised even Pepper by sounding as if she meant it. “All of you.”  
  
She looked up the table at Obadiah, caught his expression, buried a sigh. “Mister Chairman, I move to conclude the meeting.”  
  
Obadiah’s teeth grated. “Objections?”  
  
There were none.   
  
“I hope she knows what she’s doing,” John Ross murmured to Pepper on his way to the door. “Raising capital for this is going to be a stone-cold son of a bitch.”  
  
Sliding her PDA back into her purse, Pepper smiled at the board member. “I understand your concern, Mr. Ross. This is a very different direction we’re taking very quickly. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned working for Toni for all these years, it’s that Ms. Stark can do just about anything she lends her considerable talents to.”   
  
His lips twitched in half a grin. “If business were half as straightforward as engineering, Miss Potts, I’d be more reassured. Keep an eye on her, will you?”  
  
“As always, Mr. Ross, as always.” Pepper gestured at Toni’s quickly-receding figure down the hall.. “Speaking of which, I have to dash.” With a smile and a wave, the assistant followed her boss at a pace that really shouldn’t have been possible in her pumps.  
  
Only once they were in the elevator and alone did Toni visibly relax. “Well,” she said softly, her eyes closed and her hands rested behind her on the railing, “that was smoother than I thought.”  
  
“I have a feeling Obadiah is going to make things very rough pretty soon,” Pepper sighed. “I just wish I knew what.” Pulling her moisturizing lipstick from her purse, she gave her boss a sideways glance in the compact. Every other time Toni had attended meetings in New York, she always had a dinner or party or club to attend. The absence of anything social in Ms. Stark’s evening schedule concerned Pepper. “Is there anything I can do for you, Ms. Stark?”   
  
“Just back to the hotel, Pepper.” Toni’s eyes stayed closed. “And the plane back to California in the morning.”  
  
“Of course.” Tapping away at her phone, Ms. Potts reflected on her own unexpectedly free evening. Once the pilot and crew of the Pegasus were alerted to the departure time, she pulled up theater listings.    
  
“Ooh, Sondheim.”   
  
Toni’s lips twitched. “You should get yourself a ticket.” The elevator stopped, and they took the long walk across the lobby to the waiting car in their usual matched step as though nothing in the last six months had changed.  
  
Doing just that, Pepper smiled. During the ride, a shadow passed over her face. When they arrived back at the hotel, she let some of her concern show. “You know my phone’s always on, Toni.”  
  
“I’ll call you if I need you, Pepper. I always do.” Toni opened the door, walked briskly through the hotel lobby and hit the button for her floor with just a little more urgency than she would usually have allowed herself.  
  
“You ever want to tell me what happened, Toni, I’m here,” the redhead murmured to herself. Shaking her head, she called an elevator of her own.    
  
“Maybe I’ll even have the guts to ask next time.”  
  
Toni, alone in the elevator, closed her eyes and braced her fingers against the rail again to stop them shaking. It wouldn’t be home, but the room would be private and spacious enough to let her get some work done. Pen, paper, her laptop, the portable projector. It would do.  
  
She took the twenty feet from the elevator to her room door at a dignified stroll, just to prove she could. The door took her keycard, clicked open softly, barely made a sound when she pushed it open and shut it firmly behind her.   
  
Her whole body tightened, hard. Someone else had been in the room, was in the room now, and she found herself irrationally wishing for a gun. Remembered deciding, when she got back to the States, that it was paranoid to want one.   
  
Paranoia be damned, she wanted one now.  
  
“Jesus, Toni,” Lieutenant Colonel James ‘Rhodey’ Rhodes murmured from the end of the living room, “it’s just me.”  
  
“Rhodey.” Toni stood there for a long minute, caught between relief and fury, then stormed across the room with every intention of slapping the hell out of him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? I ought to build a new rocket just to mail your ass to Mars the hard way, you....”  
  
“Good friend? Concerned liaison? How about the officer who got you clearance to leave military medical care despite the trauma you’ve been through? Or the guy who got you some breathing room without clarifying the still murky conditions of your escape?” Giving Toni a coolly angry look, Rhodey raised an eyebrow. “Am I forgetting anything?”  
  
“Damn you,” she whispered, and stepped into him hard enough to leave the print of her hand pressed into his chest. For a long while, she didn’t say anything at all, and they stood there without moving until finally her shoulders straightened and she pushed herself back to look up at him with iron, disciplined calm back in her eyes. “What do you want, Colonel?”  
  
Rhodey sighed, sparing a glance at the bottle of rather nice Scotch he’d brought up. Well, straight to business, then.  
  
“One, get your ass to a therapist.” A finger jabbing the air in front of his old college buddy emphasized his point. “You’re showing signs of PTSD. That doesn’t just go away, Toni.”   
  
She didn’t try to argue, which was encouraging. On the other hand, she didn’t give him much other than that same steady look either. It had been a long time since MIT, but it hadn’t been that long. Damn.  
  
“Second, the higher-ups are mighty curious about the circumstances of your escape. They want answers. They’re going to invite you to debrief with them, Toni, and if you don’t go they’re going to subpoena you, possibly for a Congressional hearing.” He let the implications of that sink in.  Public record, media, lots of exposure. “I recommend the debrief.”   
  
She came within a hair of telling him to go fuck himself - he could see the hot surge of instinctive rage under her skin - but she let it out slow and rough before unclenching her hands. “Okay,” she said finally, “but you lead the debrief. One of those Pentagon assholes decides to try to show me his, I’m gonna rip it off.”  
  
A dry look on his face, Rhodey shook his head. “One of these days I’ll figure out how such a by-the-book guy like me wound up buddies with a genius gone wild.”   
  
Her lips twitched, just a little, and then she leaned up and surprised him with a kiss on the cheek. “Says the top-graded aerospace engineer of the class of ‘93.”  
  
“Okay, I’m a by-the-book guy with intelligence to go with my pretty face.” He grinned. “You wanna have a couple drinks or is this my cue to clear out?”   
  
She stood there a minute, too close to him by half, and uncertainty flickered in her eyes as her fingers flexed slowly, feeling the muscles of his shoulder under the suit. It surprised him, more than it should have, but she’d never been anything like that before. Toni was a woman who knew what she wanted, whether it was him out of his uniform or out of her room, and seeing her hesitate that way let him know just how much those terrorist motherfuckers had managed to mess her up.   
  
Gently lifting her hand off his shoulder, he gave it a small squeeze. “I’m thinking I should go. I don’t trust our higher brain functions to work too good with booze in the room, and you don’t seem in the mood for going out.”  
  
“Yeah.” She relaxed visibly, even laughed, then leaned up and kissed his cheek again with a little more care and her heart in her throat. “You take care of yourself, Rhodey. Get some air under you, don’t let the bastards keep you at a desk. Come out to the house in a couple of weeks and I’ll show you what I’ve got cooking in the lab - it’ll be worth the trip.”  
  
“Please. Me, fly a desk? No way no how.” Pulling her in slowly, he enfolded her slight frame in a bear hug he knew she could take. “And I look forward to it. You always have the best gear.”    
  
“Rhodey,” she whispered against his shoulder, “nobody flies it like you.”  
  
She’d left him in the living room with the Scotch and the sound of her closing door before he thought to ask what she meant.


	6. Chapter 6

At 1:00 A.M., Pepper was alone in the elevator up to the suite she shared with Toni. Almost absently she hummed a showtune as she checked her phone again. Still nothing from her boss, JARVIS, or the COO. A night without fires to put out was always nice.  
  
When she stepped out onto the right floor, she started singing softly to herself. “Someone to need you too much, someone to know you too well.” Her key slid through the reader on the door. Her lavish room had a view of Central Park, chocolates on the satin pillows, the whole nine yards. It was one of the things she loved about working for Toni. She got to travel, see amazing places, and always stay at the nicest hotels.   
  
Plunking her purse down on the table, she shrugged out of her beaded wrap and toed off her heels. She’d managed to slither out of the glittery dress and into her silk pajamas before she heard Toni through the wall their rooms shared.  
  
Now, Pepper knew Toni. She knew that her boss had a broad and hearty appetite for bedroom company and had slept in the room adjacent any number of trysts. It was why she always traveled with earplugs.   
  
This was different. Sure, some noises could be good or bad depending on your kinks, but Toni hadn’t had Pepper call any groupies or arrange any parties. In fact, she’d seemed about as antisocial as her assistant had ever seen her.   
  
There was no mistaking it. Toni was screaming alone in her bed.  
  
Forgetting about shoes or a robe, Pepper grabbed the key car to Toni’s room.   
  
She ran.  
  
Brief, fragmentary images as she came through the door - Toni’s fingers wrapped around the iron frame of the headboard, white-knuckled and straining. Sheets that were soaked in sweat and rumpled around her body, which was thrashing in tight, arrhythmic motions that reminded her impossibly of a magician she’d seen once working at a straightjacket under water. Toni’s face, taut with pain or terror or something worse, the eyes closed, the teeth set tightly behind parted lips as another strangled scream shook her.  
  
The only coherent thought that passed through Pepper’s head was that it was a Bad Thing to touch people having a PTSD nightmare, which this so clearly was. Before she knew she’d decided to move she was at the bedside lamp, turning it on and blinking in the light.  
  
“Toni. Toni, it’s me, Pepper.” Her voice got steadily louder as she stood looking helplessly at her tormented friend. She didn’t give a damn if she woke up everyone on the block. “You’re in New York. Toni? C’mon, boss lady, wake up.”   
  
Toni shuddered, opened her mouth to scream again, then jolted hard upright and her eyes came open wild with something as dangerous as any tiger. She sat there a moment, fingers twisting themselves into the sheets, her soaked tank-top clinging to her skin as her breath heaved in and out of her, staring at nothing.  
  
Worry creasing her brow, Pepper strode to the bar and came back with a glass of water.   
  
“Here. Drink this.” She held out the glass to Toni. “You’re all sweaty and dehydrated.”   
  
Toni looked at her blankly for a long minute, as if she didn’t know her at all, and then the right hand came up on autopilot and took the glass and she drained it in a long, slow, lingering swallow. Lowered it, just as automatically. The brown of her eyes was almost black in the lamp light, and her hair was damp enough to cling to the skin of her throat. “Pepper,” she whispered, voice ragged and raw, “yours is the room closer to the door.”  
  
“Yeah,” Pepper said slowly. “Do you want to switch?” At the moment, she thought she would probably sleep on the roof if Toni wanted her to.  
  
“No.” Toni’s lips twitched, ghosts and shadows still flickering in her eyes. “This is fine.”  
  
She sounded almost normal. Somehow, that just made it worse.  
  
“I’m pretty sure that ‘fine’ is not how things are right now!” As soon as she said it, Pepper bit her lip. Taking a breath, she continued. “Toni. I’ve been worried about you. You seem okay a lot of the time but I see enough to know you’re not. Not completely, anyway.” Taking a seat on the bed, she wiped the corners of her eyes and then stared hard at Toni. “You don’t have to tell me, but for God’s sake _please_ talk to someone. We all need help sometimes, Toni. Nobody’s going to think less of you for it.”   
  
“I can’t, Pepper.” Toni’s voice was very steady, her eyes unreadable but even folding her hands closed until the nails bit into her skin wouldn’t hide the shaking anymore. “I can’t.”  
  
Sighing, her right-hand woman sat on the bed a few inches from her knees.   
  
“Yes, you damn well can.” Even with them both on the same level Pepper managed to give the impression of looming righteousness. “You’ve been bottling up since you got back. I’m not going to let you drown in your pain because you’re too damn macho to even try to get help.”  Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, all the anger left her voice. “I wouldn’t just be out of a job if you don’t take care of yourself, Antonia Stark.”   
  
They sat there a long minute in silence, not moving, two still points in a universe of motion.  
  
“I killed them all,” Toni said at last in a voice like ashes. “I killed every last one of them I could find.”  
  
Saying nothing, Pepper reached out and took Toni’s hand in hers, face still, almost serene.  
  
Toni wasn’t looking at her, now, but through her. The hand in hers shook softly. “You asked me how I built it, Pepper. Time and materials, you said. The materials were easy. They practically gave them to me, once they thought I could be...” the laugh came short and sharp and bitter, boiling up from somewhere in her that was thick with pain and rot, “trusted.”  
  
Pepper’s throat flexed and her hand tightened on Toni’s. She knew she wasn’t going to like what came next.  
  
“They put a gun to my head.” Toni’s voice was almost serene, now, though her eyes were haunted and her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. “They told me they wanted the Jericho and they put a gun to my head and they told me they would kill me if I didn’t and I told them to go fuck themselves. Standing there with a fucking car battery in my arms to keep shrapnel out of my heart and I told them to go fuck themselves. You want to talk stupid and macho, that’s gotta be up there.”  
  
It was so very characteristic of Toni that Pepper had to smile through the tears gathering in her eyes. She’d call it heroic if it wouldn’t encourage more of the same.  
  
“They didn’t like that.” Toni’s voice flattened, smooth and featureless as machined iron. “So they decided I needed a little more convincing. They started with pain - not electric, obviously. Hot and cold. They didn’t want scars, for some reason, but they had an excellent doctor to patch me up afterward. After a while, I told them I’d do it just to get them to back off. It bought me a little time. Time enough for this.” She brought a shaking hand up to her chest and tapped the circle of light still glowing there.  
  
Mouth turned down, Pepper nodded. Something in her abused guts knew what was coming next. She’d suspected, always suspected, but knowing it was a reality was damn near heartbreaking. A twinge in her stomach made her focus on her breathing. _Keep it together, Potts. You can’t go to pieces just now._ Whatever it took to get Toni through this. Whatever Toni needed, she’d provide.   
  
Like always.  
  
“I was starting to have ideas, around then. Ideas for how to get out. I had the reactor, I had enough power to run something really big if I was willing to throw a serious strain on it. Really big.” Her lips twitched. “Got Yinsen to help me, even. Good hands. Very steady.”   
  
“They got suspicious, of course. They were going to torture him, threatened to put a hot coal in his mouth. I lost it a little. Shouted.” She closed her eyes. “They didn’t take it well.”   
  
For lack of a time machine or other way to take away the horror her boss had seen, Pepper started tracing circles on the coverlet with her free hand. Her other still held Toni’s like one of them was drowning.  
  
“Maybe they believed him. Maybe they didn’t. They stopped hurting him, anyway.” The iron of Toni’s voice finally cracked, and she bowed her head enough to hide her eyes so that Pepper couldn’t see if the tears came or not. “They decided I needed a lesson. An incentive. I don’t know.”  
  
“The animals,” Pepper hissed between clenched teeth. It wasn’t adequate. She wasn’t sure any word would be enough to convey her anger and disgust.   
  
“They were almost scientific about it,” Toni whispered, and there might have been the dark cousin of a laugh in it if the tears hadn’t choked it to death in her throat. “I don’t even know how many of them.”  
  
Another long silence, so thick with memory and ugly imagination that it could have choked the whole city.   
  
“But that was the trick.” Toni lifted her face, voice still a jagged whisper, her eyes very steady. “When they were finished, the way they laughed - the way they looked at me. Like a whipped dog. Stupid, simple mistake. You walk with your eyes down, you let them see the fear they expect, you let them think you know your place and they’ll give you all the time and all the tools and all the materials you want.  
  
“One hundred and seventeen days. I counted. One hundred and seventeen days to build armor that would do everything I needed it to do, perfectly, for as long as I needed it to. That would stand up to any weapon they could use, burn through any armor they had, destroy every one of my weapons they had and let me walk all the way to Kabul in air-conditioned comfort when it was done. Carrying Yinsen, if I needed to. That was how long I had to let them think they broke me.” She stopped a long moment, then smiled like the kiss of Death. “Then I killed all of them I could find.”  
  
Something dripped from Pepper’s chin onto her hand. Blinking and looking down, she freed more tears in a tiny shower. “God.” Leaning to the bedside table, she grabbed a handful of tissues and honked softly as she blew her nose. “Toni...”  
  
The soft, sharp, human laugh startled her so much that she stopped and stared. Toni shook gently, the laughter still rocking her gently in place, and finally she took the hand that Pepper wasn’t holding and put it to her mouth until she could get herself under control.  
  
“You sound like a goose,” Toni Stark informed her.  
  
Eyes and nose an irritated red that only looked the more garish for her hair, Pepper smiled. “The world’s most competent and efficient goose, I’ll have you know.”  
  
“I do know.” Toni let out a long breath, half-closed her eyes, opened them again. “I know I’m all cracked up inside, Pepper, but it’s like the metal around my heart. If it gets in, it’ll kill me, and I don’t dare let anyone take it out. Not yet. If I talk to anyone - anyone - Stane will get hold of it, or the boys at the Pentagon or both. Then they’ll take my company away from me and put it back to making weapons that’ll end up in the hands of animals like that, doing what they did to me or worse. They’ll do their best to finish what those bastards in the desert started. How does it go? ‘How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul, leave me my name!’”  
  
“You’ve still got your soul, Toni.” Pepper took the other woman’s hand again, gripping it tight. “And I’d sell my own before I let anyone try to get at you like that.”   
  
Toni looked at her for what felt like forever, or maybe was just a heartbeat, then whispered, “I think I believe you, Pepper Potts.”  
  
Pepper gave Toni’s hand one more squeeze. Reached up and brushed a still-damp strand of hair from her cheek. Smiled faintly. “You don’t get to sleep, we’re going to miss the flight in the morning.”  
  
Toni nodded, and Pepper started to rise. Stopped as Toni’s hand closed around her wrist.   
  
“Stay.” It was soft, almost too soft to hear, and there was just a hint of pleading in it. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”  
  
Pepper relaxed in tired relief. “Glad I’m not the only one. I’ll bring in some blankets for the sofa.”   
  
“Don’t be stupid,” Toni told her, and smiled faintly. “The bed’s big enough, and I won’t bite.”  
  
Half-crawling, half-sliding to the other side of the bed, Pepper laughed. “Uh-huh. I bet you snore.”   
  
“Nobody’s mentioned it yet,” Toni said. Shivered. Found a smile from somewhere before she reached up to turn out the light. “Good night, Pepper.”  
  
“G’night, b-- Toni.” Shit. Some time a long, long way back, when she wasn’t looking, they had left professional boundaries in the dust.  
  
Luxury coverlet wrapped around her, the weight of Toni tangible through the mattress, Pepper decided that was a problem for another day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, that brings us to the end of Afterimages. As you can see, it's definitely NOT the end of our story, but you can think of this as an intermission. Get a drink, get some popcorn, take a deep breath. 
> 
> When Ironclad continues, the ride's going to get more than a little rougher. Hope you're looking forward to it half as much as we are.

**Author's Note:**

> Technical and Story Notes (which will come here just as soon as we finish writing them)


End file.
